You create things of concrete and tangible value. In the eyes of the many, that makes you unworthy of generosity.

including the people who actually get paid for using your libraries

Yeah, I made around $100 in donations over last 8 years.

I guess even superstars like Evan You of Vue fame, or Andrew Kelley who made Zig, could get paid more with a well-paying (but not exceptionally so) position using their technologies.

Lol me too.

Since you got plenty of cheeky responses, I'll attempt a more serious one:

You are clearly employable - while not as amazing as it used to be, there is a clear market for software developers. Your job is not at risk of disappearing.

Musicians, though, have it tough - "we" as a society [1] accept that we want to have art but its economic value has been plummeting for a while. And while no one shed a tear when (for instance) stables had to close due to the scarcity of city horses, we do want to try and keep local artists around. And it's not like it's a waste either - if the program costed "€72 million to date but generated nearly €80 million in total benefits for the Irish economy", that's not even a bad deal.

There's of course an argument of "I bet software developers could generate more benefits than artists", which is probably true, but I'd argue artists need it more right now. And nothing stops the program from expanding eventually.

[1] Well, "they" - I'm not Irish.

> if the program costed "€72 million to date but generated nearly €80 million in total benefits for the Irish economy", that's not even a bad deal.

the accounting for the value generation is dubious at best.

Not to mention that my personal belief is that art should be patronage based, not taxation based. If the art has sufficient impact, it should be able to gather patrons to fund it. Otherwise, it's not artistic enough and naturally the artist would have to quit.

> Your job is not at risk of disappearing.

But what about the vloggers, are we so short on them? Same for clowns, I sorta feel we are in a huge surplus.

> Musicians, though, have it tough - "we" as a society [1] accept that we want to have art

But we do already have lots of art. Centuries of it in fact. Maybe the focus should be on making that art available to all, including for the purpose of using it to create new art, instead of pissing away money on select "art" that few people will see.

I always find it interesting to see something announced and the reactions are “what about me?”

I imagine you would have no trouble finding a well paying job to write software which is not the same situation for artists.

What makes you think those artists can't also find a well paying job to write software?

I’m not sure what argument you’re trying to make.

Of course they can, just like an OSS maintainer can go be a waiter.

I think this accidentally raises an interesting side-point. It's not very easy to define art. It's much easier to define free software. But I am not much closer to understanding how to solve the question "who is writing free software?" than the question "who is making art?"

> I create state-of-the-art FOSS libraries, why I can't qualify?

Because this competes with existing companies.

And artists compete with nobody?!

With which influential industry do artists compete?

Not on iOS or other locked systems.

Not enough connections to the bureaucracy…

Have you tried creating portraits of famous irish movie stars rendered in macaroni salad?

Or ASCII characters